and in later days
by kinnoth
Summary: Jamie goes home


Disclaimer: not mine

**and in later days**

From behind him, the coach wheezes to life again, coughs up a noxious lungful of black stink, and pulls reluctantly away from the kerb like an old man left too long in one place. Jamie hoists up the hood of his anorak and tugs his luggage from out of a divot in the pavement. Motherwell in the rain stands bent and hard and yellow and unchanged, and as Jamie makes his way past the hunching shops and gaping alleyways down Bellshill Road, there is a subtle difference to the stink that floods his nostrils. It's a proper, city stink; far too many people crammed into an area of far too few concessions to modernity. None of that sassenach mincing, just a city that puts up the fuckin' V and fuck all the rest.

Jamie approves of this: it's proper Scottishness, something he's always been good for, unlike Malcolm, who's never been good for anything at all (except for what he's good for) not even being English. Jamie's never been shit at as many things as Malcolm has (except, maybe, at being Malcolm), but then, he's never been brilliant at anything either. The only thing he's ever had is a temper, and then not even that, when they'd whipped it from him at school and then prayed it from him in the seminary.

Spinning out from the orbit Malcolm Tucker had taken two years, a cumulative series of tiny demotions, unreturned phone calls and unanswered tantrums. And then one sign-on-the-line letter of resignation later and half of his life like it'd never been. Like it had never occurred to him to follow some hack journalist cunt with colourless eyes and sliver-whip limbs, a voice like death triumphant from out of one shite-hole and into another. For the first time in 20 years, there is no one ringing his mobile to snarl vociferously into his ear. The silence is so complete it echoes in its place.

So Jamie goes home (though he's never really minded Scotland, not the way Malcolm does – hating it up close and resenting it from afar) after Malcolm sacks him from his job (which he never really wanted anyway – there's more than one way out of the priesthood, although most of them are through the cock).

The church doesn't take him back - the misguided bravado of taking Sadie for a beard weighs no less heavily even given the joys of estranged fatherhood - but it's where he goes anyway, every day for a month until finally, the priest there takes pity on him and asks him for his references. He almost likes the quiet now.

'Sacked enforcer to Malcolm Tucker' doesn't carry as much weight around these parts as it would back in London – here, he's still employable, where all anyone sees are a Face like a soulful rottweiler and Eyes. They ask him for his CV which he divulges, carefully: Caulkland Seminary, newsjournal contributor; The Scots Herald, editing board; Number 10, Communications Office.

Politics man, eh? they ask him, kindly, but winkingly.

No, not really, he replies, and God as his fucking witness, he doesn't need to lie.

Before he'd met Malcolm, he'd truly, honestly lost his temper only a half dozen times in his entire adult life; after, that number had gone up to eight. Some habits are hard to break, whereas some become second instinct.

He would have made a good priest, if Malcolm hadn't needed a good attack dog.

He's given a position in the lay apostolate - keeping the Church running now, instead of the country. It's basically the same thing, though the issues are a bit different and there isn't so much shouty-sweary-bollocky asked of him. He organises charities and fundraisers, helps with the monthly newsletter, and even when there's that scandal with the clergyman in the vestry with the collection tin, it's still the One True Church, not like there's an opposition to protect anything from.

And despite the honesty of going through old motions, it's not like coming home. Because maybe he'd packed away some of his faith in one of the dozen storage bins he's left back in London, but 'yes, Father' and 'no, Father' aside, it doesn't seem to matter much what he does. The church will go on, as it has for two thousand years, with or without the capability of Jamie McDonald to tie the scrotum of an uncooperative journalist into balloon bunnies and feed them to him.

That summer, the SNP starts making noise as New Labour swamps itself in discredit and scandal, a massive and useless reshuffle of ministers, and accusations of kowtowing to the EU. Jamie doesn't hear about it till weeks later, as within the same month, the Archbishop of Glasgow makes an ass of himself releasing yet another fucking statement _that could be misconstrued_ as being in defence of the fucking kiddyfiddlers. This puts another stroke in Jamie's collection of lost tempers, though he drafts up a statement vehemently back-peddling out of the outrage, even if he is way too low in the ranks and is largely ignored.

Between explaining to the mimsy, whingeing shits how to get their heads un-shoved up their arses, putting together parish news pamphlets, he barely has time to pay any attention to politics at all.

But then Steve Fleming worms his baldy head back onto the scene and Jamie - glancing perchance across the table during one of his interrogative 'chats' with his new employer - forgets where he is, slams down his paper cup of milky coffee and sloshes lukewarm liquid into Father Hamish McDowell's lap. The 12" jumps a bit. 'Jesus fucking Christ, that cocksucking cuntbag of a cunt,' he says before apologising swiftly and specifically for the blasphemy.

McDowell asks mildly, 'Do you know him, son?' like Jamie's a veteran from a foreign war, come back home broken and PTSD'd up the arse. He dabs at his cassock with a tea towel while Jamie tries to recall _words_, and then Malcolm's name comes on the screen preceded by 'spin doctor' and followed by 'resignation' and Jamie doesn't even need to answer for McDowell to assert, 'I see.'

'He, ah, he was my boss, Father,' Jamie explains, but his knee is jumping restlessly on his heel and his eyes are fixed, mad-blue and vivid on the lagging subtitles filing across the bottom of the screen.

'Sudden and unexpected move by-' says the 12", but the image has jumped to Malcolm's neighbourhood, Malcolm's house. Jamie makes a sound like a kicked bear in the back of his throat and stabs indiscriminately at the remote until he finds the mute button, then keeps his finger on the volume+ arrow until the 12" screams, 'Mr Tucker, Mr Tucker, what do you have to say about-'

Malcolm's face has a pale-bluish gauntness to it that makes Jamie want to punch the TV until the colours realign or until someone reassures him that it's always been there, and that Jamie's just never noticed (which would have earned someone a fist to the face, because Jamie would have noticed and even if he hadn't, Sam would and would have told Jamie about it). His lips are entirely gone, disappeared into the line of his upper teeth as he murmurs just beneath the clamour, 'I have nothing to say, excuse me, I just want to get home, watch the fuckin' hedge' which makes Jamie want to punch the TV for an entirely different reason.

'Oi!' Father McDowell shouts, but Jamie's fist is not, despite the hype, hard enough to crack ballsacs, and it bounces with a fairly fleshy but fairly harmless thump off the screen. Malcolm turns at the end of the path to his front door and, in one last defiance, puts two crooked fingers up at the gaggle of journalists before sweeping into his house in a swirl of dark cloth and winter air. Malcolm's eyes are still colourless, and Jamie swears they're looking right at him.

'That mad fucker,' Jamie says in awe, scarce-to-believe-it, almost manic. 'He's run himself into the fucking ground.'

Father McDowell eyes him, as Jamie does nothing to dissuade him that this terrifying, deranged permutation of his generally genial, if reticent, public relations man is just a situational thing, and not the Beast come home to roost. 'I see your past life has come back to haunt you,' he offers gingerly.

Jamie flaps a dismissive hand at him. 'No offence, Father, but it's not like you're running an Albanian monastical retreat or anything. All my past life has to do is shell out 50 quid for an overnighter and bus fare if it wants to haunt me.'

McDowell has absolutely no look on his face, offended or otherwise, when he nods. 'What are you planning to do then?'

Jamie blinks. He's going back, of course, storming the palace (that he'd helped Malcolm build, after all), rallying the troops (job or no job, the Caledonian Mafia are _his_boys), and making enough noise that even Steve fucking Fleming was bound to get the message from inside his sewage drain. It had been obvious.

But it's not any more. 'Nothing,' Jamie says, sitting back down and hitting the mute button. The hum-buzz of the church kitchen fills his ears again and Jamie can feel Malcolm's Jamie draining out of him like angry, shouting pus from an old sore. 'I'll do naught,' he says, more clearly. 'It's not my business, any more.'

Predictably, it's Sam who calls him first, two days into the Tuckergate fiasco. She's quite calm, very proper, but she'd have to be, through crisis, to have remained under Malcolm's employment for as long as she has. 'They've taken his Blackberry from him,' she tells him. Jamie doesn't ask how she got his number - he's long since accepted that Sam has Powers which are and forever will be closed to him by merit of her being the only person with GPS coordinates of _exactly_where Malcolm's bodies are buried. 'I'm sure he would have called you himself, but he had to leave all of his papers, everything at the office. I think he needs you back.'

Jamie thanks her for her call, promises to stay in touch, and pockets his second-hand flip-top Nokia, then goes on drafting a summary of church events for the next month.

He gets another call, several days later, this time from Connor Ferguson, fairly junior in the Caledonian mob, but who had brought Jamie his twelve-espresso-shot coffees and helped clean up after his bollockings. 'He hasn't even been telling us what he wants us to do,' Connor says, and he's not as good as Sam is at keeping the nervous tension from his voice. 'Frankie's just been having us stonewall that rat-faced fucker, but we need to know he's coming back.' Jamie tells him very slowly and very gently that that is entirely up to Malcolm now, and that Jamie has no more insight into the workings of Malcolm Tucker's head than the next ginger henchman. Perhaps he should try Sam?

'We have,' Connor all but wails. 'She's just been doing the same thing. We need a plan, mate, or we're goin'ta have to just play ball, aren't we?' Jamie hesitates for a bit and almost considers giving him a plan, giving his boys a next step, something to get them through the next day, the next week until their master and commander comes back, guns blazing and calling them to arms. Before he can answer though, Connor cuts in, 'He could have really used your help, you know, these last six months, especially. The polls have just been going to shit and everything's just been coming down 'round our ears, and there was this mass resignation last month when-'

'Aye, Connie, I heard. I know.' Jamie bids him well and hangs up. In the quiet again, his flat hums with static and refrigerator noises and Jamie feels a hiccup in his throat that won't go away no matter how many fingers of cheap whisky he downs. He goes to bed resigned but, for the first time since he left, he leaves his mobile switched onto vibrate under his pillow.

When the call does come, it's after nearly eight and a half fucking months of waiting and forgetting and letting go and what it is isn't even a call at all, but a text saying 'chk ur email u traitorous shit. malcxx'. Jamie doesn't need to ask which email, but as expected, his mobile rings as soon as he's finished reading its contents.

'So what the fuck do you want me to do about it?' Jamie asks, suddenly tight and very, very angry.

'It's lovely to hear your voice again too,' Malcolm drawls from the other end of the line. 'I just figured, election frenzy and all, that maybe you'd want another go at it. Or have Motherwell's town criers still got January's news to get through? I always forget to check.'

'I know about what's fucking happened, you teabagging pile of dogshit.' Jamie scrolls back up until the link of the article 'Hung parliament - Tories, Labour court Lib-Dems for coalition' comes onto the screen.

'We'll win, of course,' Malcolm tells him, casual as anything, nothing of the panic coming off in waves from the computer screen. 'And after that, there'll be new leadership bids and all that. Figured it'd be..._appropriate_ to see if you wanted in again.'

Jamie lets out a breath from between his teeth. 'No,' he says, very quietly, not Malcolm's Jamie at all. Malcolm must realise this because the silence on the other end of the line all of a sudden gets a lot less smug. 'What, do you think you can just call me up and let me go as you like? I fucking - sixteen years, Malcolm. Sixteen years - and I'm not even counting the time before - and you drop me over a fucking _pissing contest_, where _your guy_ won anyway. And now you need me again, to help you keep sit on it, to help cover _your arse_.'

'Jamie,' Malcolm says. His voice has dropped something like five fucking registers since he last spoke, and it's gained an edge on it Malcolm used to use when he was calling Jamie an uncivilised Motherwell shite, or calling him to bed. 'Jamie, we're about to lose the country-'

'Don't you fucking dare,' he snarls. He's squeezing the phone so tight, now, the plastic creaks inside his fist. 'I followed _you_, you cunt. I couldn't give a monkey's shite about New Labour this or fuckin' Tory that, but I gave you everything you wanted, and _still_ you married that posh bitch of an ice princess and _I _still followed you, because-'

He doesn't follow through because he's not a fourteen-fucking-year-old girl and Malcolm is not his insensitive fucking boyfriend and he is not about to have a good cry about this when it's all over, when he can throw his laptop through a window and go to sleep for thirty hours or until that _voice _is gone from his head again, and he can get on with his white-sound life. Or until that 'because' goes away. Whichever first.

'I know, love.' Malcolm's voice is so quiet he sounds like he's hiding. 'I know.' He probably is, after all, holed up with his precious papers somewhere in week-old grizzle and a fleece, Sam in her civvies hovering loyally just outside the door, and then the world beyond that. They're used to hiding - it's part of the reality of their condition. There is a static-filled pause during which Jamie swallows the lump in his throat and logs out of his email at the end of which Malcolm sighs and clears his throat and says, 'So how's Scotland these days?'

And it's almost ridiculous, the two of them having a normal fucking conversation like this. Jamie tells him about the events he's been scheduling and the scandal about bishops and elephant tranquillisers they're kind-of-not-really letting him sort out and Malcolm makes all the right interested interjections and doesn't sound at all like he's monitoring an unfavourable report or planning how best to flirt his way into the lap of potential leadership bids or anything. 'Jesus Christ, you've gone so fucking domestic,' Malcolm mutters at one point and Jamie almost fucking laughs at that, the man who spends weekends feather-dusting his antique Mayan vases, mixing-bowls, pot-_things _calling him domestic.

Sam's voice interrupts from somewhere further away and Jamie suddenly almost hates her for that, and Malcolm sends her politely away but Jamie knows he's got to go.

'I'll just, em,' Malcolm stutters. Tries again. 'Listen, I know - _you know_ you don't have to come back, but I-' and again '- I _do _need you here, all right? I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The eight months have been just-' he doesn't say it, but he knows Jamie knows, so it's all right. 'And I have, you know. Needed you,' he says. 'I always have. And I've missed you, you stupid twat,' he interjects violently. 'You know that right?'

Malcolm Tucker's voice does not do vulnerable. Malcolm Tucker does not do vulnerable, and yet here he is, hanging on the end of a phone line, probably purple in embarrassment. Jamie lets himself help him down before he bursts into soppy, gay, jessie bits. 'Aye, you auld cunt,' he says. 'I know.'


End file.
